William Blake (1757-1827) was an english poet, painter, and printmaker. His painting Newton is a 460x600mm monotype finished some time between 1795-1805. In the painting, mathematician and physicist Issac Newton is shown naked and crouching on a rock covered in algae in what is speculated to be either the seabed or outer space. Newton is shown engrossed as he draws a geometrical design on a scroll with a compass. In his time, Blake openly critiqued some aspects of the enlightenment movement and scientific rationality. In fact, Blake annotated one of his own engraved prints of the greek mythological figure Laocoõn with, “Art is the Tree of Life. Science is the Tree of Death.”.
Blake’s opposition to new scientific claims in his times is echoed in his portrayal of Newton in this painting as the mathematician is seen intently absorbed in geometry, perhaps in the process of making another scientific discovery, completely oblivious to the beautiful rock (covered in plants, and other living organisms) behind him. The rock has come to represent the creative world whereas the compass and the scroll represent tools used by scientific rationality to clip the wings of imagination. Blake’s Newton is compared to Urizen – a prominent figure in Blake’s mythology – who tried to measure the universe with a compass.
It is interesting to note the precision with which Newton’s body is painted; sharp angles and lines mark his muscles, hands, and legs. Consequently, his corporeal frame appears to be an assembly of geometrical shapes- even the fingers with which he is pointing at the triangle and holding the compass seem to form a polygon. Newton’s body for Blake, therefore, is a representative of reason and rationality, and the scroll, which is the testament of Science, is shown to be originating from the figure of the scientist himself.
Newton’s hunched form seems to transcend the ways a human body can bend, and mirrors the foldings of the scroll in front of him as well as the circular figure he is in the process of drawing. This, along with the image of the rock and the black backdrop of the painting shows the mathematician’s ignorance of the imaginative world, full of possibilities, where “the self finds its true mirror”. Blake critiques Newton for being incognizant to the “Platonic light of truth”.
Blake’s Newton, thereby, is an exposition of the binding world of science; it works to satirise the scientist’s obliviousness, and by extension, that of his contemporaries as well as his believers.
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